hooting indicates impending danger. They are always hearing strange voices at night, or seeing ominous shapes in the twilight wood shadows. The Metis are good hunters, and great is their joy when a belated bear is found near the camp, or a deer or moose is tracked in the snow. Their lumbering is done near the streams, so the logs may be thrown in and floated down by the spring freshets. They make a vast product of timber, sold throughout the lakes and St. Lawrence region, much going across the Atlantic. THE DOMINION CAPITAL. The earliest settler at the portage around the Chaudière Falls of the Ottawa was Philemon Wright, of Woburn, Massachusetts, who came along in 1800, and not getting on successfully, sold out about twenty years later to cancel a debt of $200. Subsequently there was established at the confluence of the three rivers, Ottawa, Rideau and Gatineau, by Colonel By, a British military post and Indian trading-station, around which in time a settlement grew which was called Bytown, distant about a hundred miles from the St. Lawrence River. It was incorporated a city in 1854 by the name of Ottawa; and when the Dominion Confederation was formed in 1858 there was so much contention about the claims of rival cities to be the capital--Montreal, Toronto, Kingston and Quebec all being urged--that Queen Victoria, to finally settle the matter, selected Ottawa. There is a population of about sixty thousand, but excepting from the noble location of the magnificent public buildings, the political importance of the city does not attract the visitor so much as the business development. The lumber trade makes the first and greatest impression; landing among boards and sawdust, walking amid timber piles and over wooden sidewalks, with slabs, blocks and planks everywhere in endless profusion, the rushing waters filled with floating logs and sawdust, busy saws running, planing-machines screeching, the canals carrying lumber cargoes, the rivers lined with acres of board piles--an idea is got of what the lumber trade of the Ottawa valley is. The timber is almost all white and yellow pine. Alongside the Chaudière Falls at the western verge of the town are clustered the great sawmills, while capacious slides shoot the logs down, which are to be floated farther along to the St. Lawrence. There are also large flour-mills and other factories getting power from this cataract. [Illustration: _Chaudière Falls, St. Lawrence_]